Mujahidin go down with Saddam
With Iran already the focus of international attention over student protests and US criticisms of its nuclear programme, French police last week arrested hundreds of Iranian exiles accused of engaging in terrorism. David Tresilian, in Paris, writes
Some 1,200 French police, acting as part of an on-going judicial inquiry into the activities of Iranian exiles living in France, last week mounted a series of spectacular dawn raids in communities outside Paris, arresting 165 people believed to be connected to the Iranian People's Mujahidin (IPM), which figures on lists of terrorist organisations drawn up by the European Union and by the US State Department.
Among those arrested were Mariam Rajavi, secretary-general of the IPM and president of the France-based National Council of the Iranian Resistance, described by French authorities as the "umbrella organisation" of the IPM, and wife of the head of the People's Mujahidin, Massoud Rajavi, expelled from France in 1986 together with 1,000 other members of the organisation.
A total of some $8 million in cash was seized during the raids, destined, according to French authorities, for buying arms and organising training for military units opposed to the Iranian government in Tehran. 200 satellite dishes and a hundred computers were also seized during the early-morning raids, though no arms were seized.
Most of those arrested were subsequently released, with 17, including Mariam Rajavi being brought before anti-terrorist judges at the weekend and 10 later being remanded in custody for formal investigation.
Among the 10 was Ms Rajavi, who was remanded in custody Sunday morning following a three-hour hearing before French anti-terrorism judges accused of "belonging to an organisation having relations with a terrorist group and of financing acts of terrorism".
The arrests were greeted with widespread protests by Iranian exile groups in France, as well as by protests outside French embassies in Berne, Rome and London, during which protestors burnt themselves alive.
In Paris, three protestors, including two women, doused themselves in petrol and set themselves alight during the course of a demonstration against the arrests. One of the women protestors subsequently died, with the other two suffering severe burns. In London, four Iranians set fire to themselves in front of the French Embassy, with a further Iranian doing the same thing in Berne and another two in Rome.
French authorities responded by banning further demonstrations by the IPM, causing supporters of the movement to declare a hunger strike. A further 75 supporters of the IPM were arrested last Friday for staging illegal demonstrations in support of those arrested, with 208 others having already been arrested since Tuesday's raids.
According to the French authorities, the raids, planned over a long period, were a "preemptive measure" aimed at preventing terrorist activities planned from French soil against the Iranian government and at investigating the operations and financing of the IPM.
The arrests had no connection with the international attention presently focussed on Iran, the French authorities said, which has come as a result of student protests against the Iranian regime in Tehran and other cities in Iran and US criticism of Iran's nuclear programme.
Since the fall of the Saddam regime in Iraq following the US-led invasion of the country, there has been a "mass arrival" in France of Iranian militants opposed to the government in Tehran, who had previously been conducting their operations from Iraqi soil, French police said.
However, commented the French newspaper Le Monde in an editorial, the arrests had also come at a time when the "mullarchie" in Iran was under pressure both from within and from without. Iranian students, the newspaper said, were protesting "the absence of freedom of expression, criticising top officials of the regime, and denouncing a religious police that still supposes it has the right to tell Iranians how to dress or to shave", while the US was "accusing Iran of stirring up trouble in Iraq, of supporting movements opposed to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, of sheltering terrorist groups and of launching a nuclear-weapons programme".
"Nearly a quarter of a century after taking power in 1979, during an Islamic revolution that was a mix of nervous depression and a collective crisis of identity, the mullarchie seems to have reached the end of its tether," the newspaper said.
Founded in 1965, the IPM carried out acts of sabotage throughout the 1970s aimed at the Shah's regime, as well as against US interests in Iran, the US then being the Iranian monarchy's strongest supporter. Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution that led to the fall of the monarchy and the declaration of the Islamic Republic of Iran under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the organisation fled repression in Iran for France, making Paris the centre for its operations against the new government in Tehran.
Both the Iranian government and the Bush administration last week welcomed the French move, a spokesman for the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs declaring that "this is a positive step on the part of France, and we expect that France will treat these people as dangerous terrorists." According to a US State Department spokesman, Washington "congratulated efforts made across the world to carry out this type of action against terrorist groups".
However, US congressmen subsequently protested to French authorities over the arrests, claiming that they served "the interests of the terrorist dictatorship ruling Iran", and calling for the release of all those detained. Iran, together with North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, is a member of US President George W Bush's "axis of evil".
Iranian President Mohamed Khatami last week asked for the extradition of the arrested persons to Iran, a request which seems unlikely to succeed since those arrested have held French citizenship since the 1980s, with the IPM operating freely on French soil since then.
Though enjoying what the French authorities have described as "fanatical" support from its supporters, leader of the IPM Massoud Rajavi being designated as "the future president of Iran", commentators have described other Iranian exile groups as being hostile to Rajavi and the IPM since the movement was in the past "financed and armed by Iran's worst enemy, the Iraq of Saddam Hussein", which fought a nearly decade-long war against Iran in the 1980s.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 26 June - 2 July 2003 (Issue No. 644)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/644/re3.htm